David G. Smith, Solutions Architect at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), ponders about Portolan (previously here and here) and what it represents for SDIs1, their operators, and their users:
That world is fading. The cloud‑native geospatial community has spent the last several years proving that spatial data doesn’t need to be served through heavy infrastructure. It can simply live in object storage. It can be organized with open metadata. It can be accessed directly by standard tools. It can be used by people and by generative models without a middle layer that slows everything down.
The article summarises the developments around Portolan and the cloud-native2 geospatial paradigm. If you haven’t looked into these yet, it is a good high-level summary:
The long‑term vision is a federated network of interoperable catalogs published by national mapping agencies, cities, NGOs, researchers, and global data providers. The Portolan registry is the first step. It is nothing more than a catalog of catalogs. The underlying bytes never leave the publisher’s storage. If the registry disappeared, every catalog would keep working.
This is a quiet but profound shift. Discovery becomes easier. Interoperability becomes normal.
Of course, interoperability means more still – especially in federal/federated settings with decentralised but shared responsibility for maintaining data. But the vision of federated data catalogues is attractive – a fediverse of data, if you will.
Footnotes
Spatial Data Infrastructure: a framework of technologies, policies, and standards that enables the discovery, access, and sharing of geospatial data.↩︎
I.e., taking full advantage of the cloud computing model; in the data world typically through enabling partial downloads of file contents through so-called HTTP range requests.↩︎